Linda Brown

Linda R. Brown received her J.D. from Thomas Jefferson School of Law in 1981. She has been a criminal defense attorney for her entire career, first working for Defenders Inc. handling court appointed cases until 1988 when the County of San Diego established the Office of the Public Defender. She was then a public defender from 1988 until she retired in 2009 to set up a private practice, still exclusively handling the defense of criminal cases.

During her career she has conducted more than 235 trials defending persons accused of the whole range of crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, such crimes as narcotic sales, assault, robbery, rape, kidnap and homicide, including one death penalty case.

Ms. Brown has been president of the San Diego Criminal Defense Bar Association, and president of the Criminal Defense Lawyers Club, an organization where membership is by invitation only, based on one’s reputation in the legal community. Ms. Brown is very well respected in her legal community and has received numerous awards from her peers. Those that particularly stand out are the Community Service Award presented by the San Diego County Bar Association, the Courage Award, and the War Horse Award (twice) presented by the San Diego Criminal Bar Association, and the Exemplary Service Award (twice) presented by the San Diego Public Defender. In 2010, Ms. Brown was named Trial Attorney of the Year by the San Diego Criminal Defense Bar. That same year she received the E. Stanley Conant Award for “Unselfish Devotion to Protecting the Rights of the Indigent Accused” presented by the Board of Directors of the Defender Programs of San Diego. In 2011, Ms. Brown was named one of the Top 10 Attorneys of San Diego in the category of criminal defense by the San Diego Daily Transcript.

Ms. Brown has been a lecturer on numerous occasions for continuing legal education courses for the San Diego County Bar Association, the State Public Defender Organization, the San Diego Criminal Defense Bar and Defender Programs of San Diego.

Since 2009, Ms. Brown has been a frequent instructor for various courses of oral trial advocacy in Spanish for which she has traveled to Guayaquil, Ecuador, and multiple times to many cities in Mexico: Campeche, Cancun, Ciudad del Carmen, Cuernavaca, Durango, Guanajuato, Mexicali, Mexico City, Pachuca, Puebla, San Luis Potosí, Tecate, Toluca, Vera Cruz, and Villahermosa. Ms. Brown has been certified as a teacher by the Mexican government organization SETEC.